Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Lettering

I’ve been hand-drawing some type recently – and looking closer at my favourite typefaces, Univers and Futura – and I remembered I’ve yet to get comfortable drawing the ‘s’. So I decided not to leave my desk until I managed to get something decent drawn.

Here’s the result below. I compared it with the Futura and Univers characters afterwards and thought it struck quite a nice contrast. My letter is a little bottom heavy because of the grid I used – I did put form before function tbh (I used golden proportions between the lower and upper circular parts) It may be worth continuing but for now I’m happy I’ve sussed the ‘s’ to some extent.

I found it useful in Illustrator to zoom right out from the letter to make sure it was working at a small scale – as you would with a logo, for instance. Playing around with the stroke size also helps – making it really thin/fat will uncover any errors in the curves.